


Homecoming

by FunkyinFishnet



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Action/Adventure, Character Study, F/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-04
Updated: 2010-03-04
Packaged: 2017-10-07 17:24:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/67389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FunkyinFishnet/pseuds/FunkyinFishnet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post 'Doctor's Daughter'. Jenny has her own adventures, gains herself a reputation, and sees a million stars. She learns who she is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Homecoming

The first thing Jenny does when she lands on Alpha Miro is find a change of clothes. She trades her fatigues for comfortable dark trousers and a beautiful green wrap top and takes a deep breath of the new fresh alien air. She can't stop smiling.

She wanders through the marketplace, taking everything in. Her first new world! There's a sort of guard, keeping watch on corners. She can see the glint of weaponry in strategic positions. She grins, glad she kept her boots. They're good for running in.

There's a little boy looking at her from under a table. His expression is full of fear and he runs off before she can even take a step closer. It's not just him; everyone's avoiding looking her in the eye. It feels strange.

There's a huge commotion coming from a nearby street and Jenny's the only one who steps in to stop two guards beating down a man for not keeping his eyes to the ground. She thinks it's what her dad would have done and Donna definitely would have.

Jenny's taken to a large fortress where the man in charge is wearing long purple robes and a mask across his face. There's guards everywhere here and a man in black who stands like he's trained to kill. Jenny feels the knife that she swiped from a guard resting against her thigh.

The purple man demands that she bow down before him. That order must be preserved and that society needs a leader, a figurehead, a god. She can hear her dad's voice in her head and Donna's echoing behind it. They both sound scornful. Jenny sounds the same way out loud.

The man laughs and says that she'll fight for his entertainment, like all the other criminals do. Jenny grins.

It's her and the man in black. There's grit on the floor and the purple man watching. Jenny keeps the knife hidden. She'll use it if she has to. There's always a choice.

The man is strong and skilled. It's a long fight. He breaks at least two of her fingers and her ribs hurt. But Jenny remembers that boy's face, so scared, and she doesn't give up. Someone's got to show them not to be afraid, so they can enjoy the universe too. Just like she's starting to.

She slashes at the man's knuckles with her knife, takes a breath, and knocks him unconscious. But she refuses to kill him. The leader says she hasn't won unless her opponent is dead. Jenny tears his mask off and the guards yell. There's lots of activity that she doesn't understand. The leader's arrested and put in the dungeon in chains and others are let out, pale and blinking.

Jenny is given food, salty on her tongue with lots of green plants that she asks the names of, and someone binds her wounds. But no one tells her anything and she wants to learn. She wears the knife on her belt openly now - it saved her life - and tells a guard to take her to find some answers.

There's a new man on the big chair. He's older with a kind face and the same purple robes that the other man wore. He thanks Jenny for her help and explains about governments and low-level members and unsuitability. Things had gone wrong, Jenny works out, and the wrong man got put in charge without anyone realising.

"I have need of a new bodyguard," Crano, the new proper leader, says.

"No, thanks," Jenny replies, smiling. "I've got new worlds to see."

 

*

On a tiny green planet on the edge of this solar system, there's a huge slab of stone at the centre of a stone circle overlooking purple-tinted seas. Jenny runs her hands over the letters carved into it, somehow knowing what they mean. She remembers her dad's words. A shared suffering. A war.

She presses her hand hard against the stone. It's her story too. She wants to know it.

*

She learns to dance a tarantella in a place settled on the edges of the Cheria Nebula. The skirts feel alien, fringed and gold, but the dance is wonderful. Like a freedom she never knew existed. It's exhilarating.

She has patient fun teachers who love her enthusiasm, and she ends the evening hardly buzzing at all from the potent peach wine she's been drinking, and sprawled against the wall with a talented dancer called Wayran who likes her skirt a lot. This is not the first time an evening has ended this way and she doesn't plan for it to be the last. It's all part of the adventure.

Dancing is fun and there's always more to learn.

*

Jenny meets her first monster when she's crawling through tunnels on an ice planet. The locals say it's an unstoppable beast and that it comes down to the city deep in the night to satisfy its hunger. It sounded exciting.

Then there's a roar and the radio strapped to her hip gives out only static. Oly and the others won't be able to hear if she needs help. It's all down to her. That's fine. She's found that she likes pushing herself.

The tunnel widens out into a cavern and she just has time to register the smell of rotting meat when there's a blur of sand-coloured fur and she's lifted high off the ground. She's staring down into the large almond eyes of……something. There's teeth bared in a growl and sharp claws and a lot of animal.

That part of her brain, the original core of who she was, is telling her to kill again. To reach for a knife or a rock and finish it. Kill the enemy. She will if she has to, but her hand doesn't reach for her blade. Not yet.

The village is disappointed when she doesn't come back with a carcass dragging behind her, only blood on her hands. But they give her the honour of joining their monthly hunt and she wears the teeth of the boar-like creature she brings down on a cord around her neck.

*

The Traveller, they call her. Goes from one planet to the next in her spaceship. Tells people about the worlds out there to see. Likes dancing, likes learning new things, smiles and laughs a lot. Especially when she's running.

She's a strange one, the Traveller. But she does good.

*

There's several prices on her head, even in the places where people think she's just a myth. One bounty hunter is sly and surprises her. He shoves something in her face that knocks her out and drags her back to his ship. Takes her knife for a trophy. Thinks he's won.

But Jenny knows spaceships and doesn't carry just the one knife anymore. She knows how to surprise as well.

The knife in her boot sheath damages the ship's power conduit, and then a high kick, in the split second he's distracted by the damage, keeps him quiet. Jenny lands the ship, retrieves both her knives, lets the authorities know that a dangerous criminal awaits collection, and waves him off when he's taken away. It makes her laugh.

It's not the first time a greedy someone tries to surprise her. But Jenny is still a soldier in the back of her mind because that is a choice occasionally, too, and she is ready.

*

She marries Matthew during a heady celebration at one of Venure's top universities. It's where she met him a year ago, before he helped her break up a slavery ring in a nearby city. She was in his class but only stayed for a term because, whilst she loved learning, she couldn't stay still. She likes to travel too much and explore.

Matthew taught her old Earth Hindi and travels with her for a while after she drops by every three sun cycles. She likes the way he talks. He gives her a ring with a jewel full of light and she wears a deep blue sari for the ceremony with fine gold chains wrapped all the way from her wrists to her elbows and rows of gold anklets.

He doesn't ask for forever, but he does travel with her for four straight cycles before he returns to his students. His kisses taste of the _sachim_ fruit that grows in the university grounds and he dribbles its juices down her body so that it becomes part of her skin.

He has a home prepared for her whenever she's ready to put down roots.

*

She asks about her dad everywhere she goes. Sometimes it gets her thrown in jail; other times there are feasts thrown in her honour. What her dad does is complicated, Jenny is learning, and she still doesn't have all the answers. He has to make difficult choices. She thinks she's made the wrong ones before on her travels because there's still so much she doesn't know. People have died: innocent people. Terrible things have happened. They're like scars; they're permanent. She doesn't like them at all.

Once she helped a poor thin girl give birth, held the child in her arms. Only a moment later, it was gone, faded to nothing. Whatever she'd done, it hadn't been enough. She never forgets.

*

There's a mountain on Milighan that Jenny immediately wants to climb. The view from the top is spectacular and she laughs as she drinks in the gorgeous fresh air.

"You do that a lot," Carl, the engineer who's been travelling with her since he helped her slay a squid-like creature off Toptoc Bay, tells her.

"What?"

"That." Carl points to her feet and Jenny sees that she's stood right on the edge, her toes resting on nothing at all. She doesn't bother moving back. "You're going to get yourself killed."

"No, I won't." Jenny's absolutely certain. "There's too much to see. Come on."

She teaches him the tarantella that night and finds him a few days later, because there's never a schedule and they take their time, wrapped up in a pretty red-headed bar girl called Freya. They look good together, Jenny decides, as she asks for a coffee (hazelnut with lots of cream, her favourite way to take it).

But Carl probably won't stay here though. He likes complicated machines that he can take apart and improve. He'll probably stop travelling with Jenny eventually. There's only so much he can do to her spaceship.

*

"Jenny………."

Macha lands against her, breathless. The cell stinks of animal droppings and Jenny's shoulder hurts from the hot iron that burned it. It doesn't help that her hands are bound behind her back.

"I can't reach my knife."

"No need."

Macha has one hidden on her belt that she angles out and uses to set them both free.

"My mother taught me," Macha explains as Jenny retrieves her own knife. "She was a warrior. She carried a knife with her always."

"My dad carries a screwdriver."

Macha gets a funny look on her face, and after they've helped the revolution and watched the new government go into office, she tells Jenny a story about the man her mother travelled with. He always carried a screwdriver too and a bag of Jelly Babies.

It ends with Macha's tears, though her face is careful and serious, and all she can finish with is, "the war." Jenny holds her hand tight and takes her to the planet with the stone circle. Macha tells Jenny more of her mother's stories. They fall asleep together, sharing blankets by firelight, the purple ocean lapping at the cliffs with a sound like whale song.

*

Jenny takes gifts for Matthew whenever she goes back to him. Right now, his room smells of fresh apple grass. Matthew traces patterns on her body as they lay together, theories and ideas and words she's still learning.

Carl even comes to visit them sometimes, with Timeon and Gladstone and baby Jael. Jenny likes holding the baby. Looking into Jael's eyes is like looking into the stars. It leaves Jenny feeling breathless and small.

"What's it like?" she asks Carl.

He extends his good arm and draws her back in. "Like you're at the top of a mountain."

*

There are a lot of religions out there in the universe and each one claims to be true. It confuses Jenny. She wants to believe them all. They promise such wonderful things. But they can't all be right.

"Everyone's trying to make sense of what they find out there," Matthew tells her, looking like he loves her a little more when she wrinkles her nose.

Jenny visits every temple and holy place she comes across and talks to the priests. She becomes a member of the ones she likes the best and gets tattoos and bracelets. Sometimes she sees pictures of her dad there. She's thrown out of one chapel because she laughs at the smile on his face and tries to take the picture with her.

*

Star is a little girl with shining red hair the colour of pig apples. Jenny finds her in an empty shell home carved into a hillside on a planet soon to be demolished by a wayward moon. She won't give her name so Jenny gives her one, naming her after the prettiest thing she knows. Star won't speak. Jenny gives her ice cream; it always helps her feel better. She doesn't want the child to look so sad.

She takes the girl to the brightest places she knows, full of love and dancing and laughter, so Star can see that she's not alone. Star's eyes get big and wide and she starts to sign. It's beautiful to watch. Like movement in water. Jenny sits beneath the tent canopy with her and slowly starts to understand.

"A place full of diamonds," Star's hands insist.

That was where her family talked about going. So Jenny takes her to snow planets and the glass lakes of Mikoa and Woman Wept when the storms freeze everything. But none of it is right. A lot of people volunteer to look after Star and find her a home. Jenny trusts almost all of them, but Star holds onto her tight. She doesn't want to be left again.

"We'll find them together," Jenny tells her.

She gives the girl one of the boars' teeth to wear around her neck and Star presses little fingers to Jenny's arm like a 'thank you'. Jenny feels full, like her smile is stretching.

Star never does tell Jenny her name.

*

"Did you ever find your truth?" Matthew asks her one day, when he's stacking books high up on a shelf. He's collected them for as long as Jenny has known him.

She looks up from her vidscreen and thinks about her old battered spaceship. The way Carl retrofitted it, it keeps on going. She's plastered one room with her wanted posters, some of which she can't even read. She thinks about that planet with the words in stone and the boar teeth around her neck and the knife she carries with her everywhere and Macha and her mother and the tarantella that Matthew surprises her with one day like he knows it's her favourite. The ashes under her fingernails and the burn on her shoulder, one of many souvenirs, and the baby that disappeared in her arms. She has killed and will kill again.

Star, now a young teenager teaching people how to sign, and who has a child of her own now that she won't name.

And Jenny thinks about her dad, who she still hasn't seen again. She's always one step behind him and is determined to catch up. And, then, there are all those planets out there that she still hasn't visited and all that running.

There's something growing inside of her now that will be added to the list too. Matthew's thinking about taking a holiday with her, a year away from the university.

And she smiles until her teeth hurt.

_-the end_


End file.
